Bill Watt’s Blog

Really? This is the new marketing for the show Age of Love?

The day started pretty early since I had to make my way to the underground, find my way to the Heathrow Express, and then get checked into Virgin Atlantic. The first two steps proved very easy with the underground stops very close to the hotel. Turns out there were some problems with the underground that were between me and Heathrow. This meant people who would normally just take the underground to Heathrow had no option but to take the Express (which costs more) so they were only charging the underground rate for the faster route. Not bad and saved like $20.

I got to the airport fast enough but checkin was slower than I expected. Thankfully I’d left early enough to be in advance of the crowd that surged after me. Once I got checked in I found a Starbux and settled down to wait for my flight.

It was a good flight, 10 hours + is a long time to be seated. The DVD player + ipod thing was great and I watched Grosse Pointe Blank, which is still one of my favorites, and several shows I downloaded from itunes. There were also some good UK shows that I hope make it to the states at some point.

OK, enough about the hotel. On Thursday I just chilled and walked a bit to get my bearings. Friday was my day in the British Museum (wiki reference) and a chance to see all my favorite pieces including the Rosetta Stone. I’ll have to dig up the pic of Corinne standing next to it from the last time I was there in 1991.

Here’s the truth about me- when I’m in a place like that it makes me wish I had worked harder in college and done something big with my love of History. Teaching, museum work, archaeology… something. It is at these moments I have my biggest delusions of grandeur. Well, it is nice to let my mind wander when I’m in a place like this and think about what might have been. Sadly, the 80/20 rule works well for the start-up world but I never thought it would work for teaching.

I left the hotel at 8:30 and made it pretty quickly to the museum. Happily there is a starbux right across the street so I went in and grabbed a coffee and a muffin and did some reading. They open the doors earlier than they allow you into the exhibits so I wandered around the main area for a bit and mapped out all that I wanted to see. Once the exhibits opened I just wandered for 2 hours or so. The Rosetta Stone was right inside the door to the gallery I first entered and it is still impressive to me even after all these years. To think that this one message carved in 3 different languages provided the key to understanding hieroglyphics is really impressive. Thinking about the potentially equally impressive finds being destroyed in the Middle East right now saddens me (and I know it is an Argument from Silence… allow me this one).
The mummies are still a big draw and I had several folks stop to ask me if I’d seen them and how to get there as I wandered other parts of the museum. I find it really interesting how they lay out the technologies used to inspect mummies and what they can see inside with CAT scans and what not.

I still get the excited feeling inside when I think about what could be done to modernize the exhibits and how to make it more interesting to kids growing up with web 2.0 understandings. The Technology Museum in San Jose had a really cool intereactive element that would be really interesting to tie into these more traditional museums. For instance, in San Jose you get a tag that looks like you’ve checked a bag and each time you go to an exhibit you scan the bar code on the exhibit and it logs your interest for later viewing. No personally identifiable information is collected but the viewer can acess the museum website later and see the list of exhibits they liked, customize the order, and do some simple presentation editing if they’d like to make their interests public. The user can also get a link that they can include in a blog or other site that could be a really interesting way to get people back to the real world museum.

Think about a world where each exhibit has display screens and when you scan your bar code you’ve told them your prefered language and the associated commentary displays in that language. With the world of outsourced translation all the text could be localized and displayed in many languages instead of just English, French and German.
See, told you. Delusions of grandeur.

Mangelo- lest you worry that I was all touchy feely on this excursion, I did stop a few folks who were touching different exhibits. I love that the British Museum has guided tours where people who can’t see are able to touch some of the exhibits to experience what the rest of us see. The signs clearly say the rest of us should not touch because it wears down the stones over time. It drives me nuts when people think they are above the rules like that.

On Thursday I bid goodbye to Luxembourg and flew back to London on LuxAir. I found the Grand at Trafalgar Square on Expedia for a relatively cheap rate (considering the pound is 2 to 1 to the dollar). I didn’t do much in the way of review because the star rating was good, the price was great, and the location seemed ideal. I was prepared to be let down actually but when I got there everthing was awesome.

Let me be clear, in terms of what I look for in a hotel this place is trying to do it all right. The place was very clean, the staff was there but wasn’t in my face and there were a number of self checkin and checkout machines available so I could just do what I wanted and not wait in line. Since I booked via Expedia they didn’t have my credit card and while I was looking up my confirmation number on my laptop the person at the desk walked over and made it all work for me. That was the right level of attention for me.

The room was really clean, the bathroom was a little odd especially given the rest of my European stays where the bathroom was generally the same size as the rest of the room (or the room was the same size as the bathroom… whatever your perspective). There was no tub so you just stepped over a small lip and pulled a curtain whihc made it feel like a locker room but since I was the only one there it wasn’t such a big deal if a little water made it over the lip and onto the bathroom floor.

This hotel is part of Club Quarters, which I had never heard of but friends of mine are apparently members. It had some interesting ammenities and would be worth checking out if you travel to any locations they serve. It isn’t high on posh ammenities like the Westin but it was hundreds less and had everything I was looking for in a hotel. The service was friendly, the bed was big, the TV had quite a few options and the Wifi was ok.
While there were many things I liked about this hotel one of the best was the location. It was so easy to find and I had two big bags so I wanted to find my room and stop lugging them ASAP. Then exploring was a piece of cake because I was literally 500 steps from 2 underground station and Trafalger Sq. All the places I’d walked with Ryan and Megan were incredibly close.

We went over to the Kikuoka golf club and had lunch followed by 9 holes. Wasn’t my worst round but wasn’t my best either. No pars so that sucks. It was an awesome day out and nice to get outside exercise.

I started this morning by taking a walk around the hotel area and checking out some shops. Found a Starbux and got the morning started right. I’ve heard there are no Starbux in Luxembourg so this was my last chance to get a soy latte. After a while I headed back to the hotel and chilled for an hour before checking out.

We wrapped up the weekend in Paris with a brunch in a pretty cool area of the city and managed to get a table outside for some people watching. We met Sravathi’s cousin and a friend of Fabrice and the 5 of us just relaxed there for a while.

Then we jumped in the car and headed for Luxembourg. Problem was the mayor of Paris (I think) has ordered the expressway around the river to be closed to cars on Sundays so that people would have a walking mall and I guess they even bring in sand to create a fake beach. Anyway, this meant we had to travel along the surface roads and this added about an hour to the drive. Once we got out of the city it was an awesome drive and the countryside was gorgeous.

We went to a really good Chinese place and got a bunch of take out, went back, and watched some of the French Open finals on the DVR.

My friends came to town for the French Open so I booked Friday and Saturday night in the same hotel for convenience factor and that meant a move to the Westin Paris. Oh man, the price tag for the room and for Internet access were the only things less than perfect about this place!
The service was awesome, the room was gorgeous, and the location perfect. It was a few minute walk down to the Louvre and from my hotel room window I looked out on a huge park and had a perfect view of all the Eiffel Tower.

Danny was in town for a few days on his way back from a family reunion so we met up and grabbed lunch (the carbonara I got was amazing). After lunch we walked a good bit of the Louvre and then headed to the Eiffel Tower. Since I’d been biking the first part of my sabbatical and then walked a ton my first few days in Engalnd I was a little sore but nothing like what I felt when we started doing the climb up the tower. Oh man, I was hoping my legs would fall off so I’d have an excuse to stop. Danny mocked me a bit for being slow so I had to keep going.

After the tower we decided to head back to our respective hotels, relax, and meet up for dinner when the other guys were done with tennis. I ended up getting a little turned around and walked for another 2.5 hours. It was great though and I got to see a ton of the city in a pretty relaxed manner. When I figured out where I was it was pretty easy to get back, just long. I walked the entire length of the avenue de la Grande Armée, around the Place de l’Étoile, and down the Champs-Élysées. From the Place de la Concorde it was pretty simple to get back to the hotel. I arrived back with my room ready and a shower and nap needed!

I called Danny and it turns out he had wandered too, although he knew where he was. He ended up checking out the wine, cheese and fruit vendors and took some back to his hotel where he met quite a people willing to share in his spoils.

Nirav, Fabrice, and I headed out to dinner in a location pretty close to Danny but the people at his hotel didn’t help him find the place and Google Maps sent him here and there before getting him to the right location. We sat outside and watched people walk past and man, there was a ton to take in.

I am using Twitter for more frequent updates because I can access it (most of the time) from my Blackberry using Google Talk instead of needing my laptop and an internet connection. If you’re interested, read my twitter messages. You can also get from here to the Twitter posts for my friends that have signed up if I’m linked to them.

One new toy I bought for the trip is a DVD player that has a plugin slot for an iPod. I don’t know how long the Best Buy link will be available but I’ll link it here anyway because they do a nice job describing it.

This thing is really nice. It isn’t heavy although maybe a little bulky but it was easy to play my legacy DVD’s or flip to content I downloaded from itunes before I left. Also, plugging in the DVD player recharges the DVD battery and the ipod at the same time so it was nice to only need one cable. This isn’t a huge savings since I normally charge the ipod off the laptop to cut down on adapters and also so I can update with new podcasts or other content downloaded while I am on the road.

Still, it is a really nice until that was great for the plane and the longer train rides. The ipod screen is nice but if I can see the same thing on the 8.5″ widescreen why would I watch the smaller screen?

If you’re traveling coast to coast or longer, let me know and maybe I’ll loan you this to try. It is pretty sweet.

I woke up from my nap, checked for wireless access and found that it was a free city-wide wireless day. I got my code and gained 24 hours of access to the local provider. I checked email and scouted out what was in the area. After a few emails back and forth with Nirav we had a plan to meet up when they got to the city so I decided to start walking and see what was around. After a while Nirav called and said that they had an invite to go to a party thrown by a woman who works for eBay. After walking for a while I finally found an available cab (it was much harder a task than it needed to be) and made my way over to the hotel where Nirav and Fabrice were staying. They had already had a bite to eat so I rushed to catch up and we were off and running.

The party was a really good time. You know me, meeting new people coupled with the not knowing how much English would be spoken made the whole idea a little intimidating but the people were very kind and many folks spoke to me at length. It does make me laugh how embarassed people can be when speaking to me in English while we’re all in Paris. Don’t they know that their English is way better than my French? I appreciated them taking the time and speaking slowly for me.

The party was thrown by a woman who works for Kijiji and she had a couple eBay folks over so it worked out great for me! I am never shy about work talk and it is always fun to see the expressions on people’s faces when they find out there is a group inside eBay that does what we do.

The party was also fun because it was just a normal Thursday night get together in the heart of Paris. If I had been traveling on my own I would never had had the chance to experience such an event or meet those folks. This was also the first night I met Fabrice, a friend of Nirav’s who also came to see the French Open. He had the onerous tasks of (1) being our guide and (2) being introduced as Nirav’s friend. He was an awesome person to hang out with and we had some good talks over the next few days in Paris and then again when we hung out in Luxembourg the following week.